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User blog:Pyschopasta/Humans Are The Real Evil?
Hey guys, I'm Cartouche, the Son of Bast of Lower Egypt, and I have a bone to pick with human mortals! What drives human behavior? Why do they do what they do? Is free will an illusion? Has civilization made them better? And can they escape their tribal past? These questions (and many, many others) are the subject of a new book called Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. The author is Robert Sapolsky, a biology professor at Stanford and a research associate with the Institute of Primate Research at the National Museums of Kenya. In a brisk 800 pages, Sapolsky covers nearly every facet of the human condition, engaging moral philosophy, evolutionary biology, social science, and genetics along the way. The key question of the book — why are we the way we are? — is explored from a multitude of angles, and the narrative structure helps guide the reader. For instance, Sapolsky begins by examining a person’s behavior in the moment (why we recoil or rejoice or respond aggressively to immediate stimuli) and then zooms backward in time, following the chain of antecedent causes back to our evolutionary roots. For every action, Sapolsky shows, there are several layers of causal significance: There’s a neurobiological cause and a hormonal cause and a chemical cause and a genetic cause, and, of course, there are always environmental and historical factors. He synthesizes the research across these disciplines into a coherent, readable whole. In this interview, one of the interviewers talked with Sapolsky about the paradoxes of human nature, why they're capable of both good and evil, whether free will exists, and why symbols have become so central to human life. And honestly, it sums up the whole thing about why they think cats are evil, cause their still connected to their past and think that the cats, are witches in disguise. The conventional explanation for that; is that people are able to do terrible things to other only after having dehumanized them. In the case of the Holocaust, for example, Germans were willing to exterminate millions of Jews in part because Nazi ideology taught them to think of Jews as subhuman, as objects without the right to freedom, dignity, or even life itself. Paul Bloom, a psychology professor at Yale, thinks this explanation of human cruelty is, at best, incomplete. I spoke to him about why he thinks its wrong to assume cruelty comes from dehumanization — and about his grim conclusion that almost anyone is capable of committing staggering atrocities under the right circumstances. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows: *Sean Illing: "Can you sum up your argument about the roots of human cruelty?" *Paul Bloom: "A lot of people blame cruelty on dehumanization. They say that when you fail to appreciate the humanity of other people, that’s where genocide and slavery and all sorts of evils come from. I don’t think that’s entirely wrong. I think a lot of real awful things we do to other people arise from the fact that we don't see them as people. But the argument I make in my New Yorker article is that it’s incomplete. A lot of the cruelty we do to one another, the real savage, rotten terrible things we do to one another, are in fact because we recognize the humanity of the other person. We see other people as blameworthy, as morally responsible, as themselves cruel, as not giving us what we deserve, as taking more than they deserve. And so we treat them horribly precisely because we see them as moral human beings." Yes, nobody can explain it better, than Paul Bloom. Category:Blog posts